ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kate Bucca is pursuing her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she serves as a reader for Hunger Mountain and was the 2016-17 Vermont Book Award Fellow. She is the author of Companion Plants (Fomite, 2014) and an intern at the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, where she reviews manuscripts. Her work has appeared in Limestone, The Nervous Breakdown, DigBoston, The Manifest-Station, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She lives in the Mad River Valley with essayist Dominic Bucca and their 17-pound cat, Snack.
Plainfield, Vermont
— for W.E. Butts
I counted the stars in fistfuls, cool
New England clarity, allowing my eyes
to blur —
as if by not seeing I'd see more —
looking for the picture lost
in the picture. Light streaked
across the sky, smoldering
space.
A meteor is only a meteor
when it begins to burn —
the light is the naming.
*
Abnormal cells dividing
claimed you —
a constellation of disease
tunneling through lungs, soft tissue.
Too late,
a new treatment
appears on the horizon:
clusters of gold atoms exploded
through the bloodstream
congregate
around tumors;
infrared light excites
the particles
to incinerate the cancer cells.
*
I counted the stars in fistfuls
because I couldn't bear
to be inside —
but even the expanse of firmament
wasn't vast enough to hold my grief.
Another meteor attempted
the descent
into our atmosphere.
If the stars survive,
maybe you are standing,
somewhere, formed again
of dust, watching
a streak of light
stitch across your own sky.
The late poet Walter Butts was a dear writing mentor to me while I earned my BFA at Goddard College. When I returned for a visit to Goddard's campus in Plainfield, I found myself overwhelmed by memories of him. Everywhere I looked, there he seemed to be. As an atheist, about the only concept of an afterlife I find credible and comforting is the knowledge that we're all star dust and return to the universe as particles. I like to think of Walter playing pool and writing poems somewhere out amongst the stars.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
